Failceeding

Just let it happen.

If you are short on time, just read part two

Part One

As a student at the Maneuver Captains Career Course (MCCC) at Fort Benning, Georgia in 2015, I was lucky enough to attend the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Ia Drang during the Vietnam War. This battle was made relatively famous by the book We Were Soldiers…Once and Young By Joe Galloway, and further popularized by a movie of the same name starring Mel Gibson. Members of the 7th Cavalry Regiment, the unit that fought in the battle, came and spoke to us about their experience. I still get chills when I think about it.

The thing I remember most was one of the platoon leaders from the second battalion of the 7th Cavalry Regiment (2-7) telling us about the disaster at Landing Zone (LZ) Albany. When his company was ambushed, dozens of his soldiers were killed in the first few minutes. He jumped on the ground and laid flat under the hail of bullets. The unit disintegrated all around him. With the look of a man who was reliving a nightmare, he trembled as he said, “I didn’t know what to do. I thought to myself, ‘should I do something?’ But then I thought, ‘there must be major or a colonel who knows what’s going on and they’ll come and tell me what to do.’ It was terrible. The Vietnamese troops ran right through us.”

I was paralyzed. In that moment, I was him laying under the hailstorm of Vietnamese bullets. I could feel exactly the thoughts that were in his brain. I could never, ever let this happen – not to me, not to anyone I ever led.

The 1st battalion of the 7th cavalry (1-7) is famous for its harrowing victory against overwhelming odds during the battle. It is the battalion portrayed in the movie and a battalion that is frequently held up as a paragon of military excellence.

The 2nd battalion of the 7th cavalry (2-7) is not portrayed in the movie. It is mostly forgotten. This is because the 2nd battalion was almost completely obliterated by the Vietnamese. They sustained enormous casualties and their battalion commander shut down mentally and was completely unable to issue orders.

All good units are the same. All bad units are bad in their own special way. When I study Military History, I prefer to study the failures and disasters and read about bad units. Why? I learn way more by studying what not to do and trying to avoid mistakes than by trying to copy successful commanders. Every officer who has ever commanded so much as a field kitchen aspires to be some version of George Patton or Napoleon Bonaparte. But what I really want is not be Charles Townshend or Arthur Percival.  

The men of 1-7 did an outstanding job at Ia Drang. They pulled off one of the greatest tactical victories in the history of the United States Army, and they acted like it (no shade whatsoever - they deserved to act like it! They earned it!). Their Commander, Hal Moore, was a brilliant leader and a fierce warrior (Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to attend the reunion). But I don’t remember anything that they said about the battle.

The men of 2-7 suffered one of the most horrendous tactical disasters in the history of warfare. They got my attention, and everything they said stuck.

What happened? What was the difference between these two battalions from the same regiment? 1-7 was a crack unit. They had been personally selected and trained by Hal More. They were a tight-knit organization that was ready for the chaos of combat. 2-7 was the opposite. They were a hodge-podge unit thrown together at the last minute. Many of the soldiers, and even some of their officers, weren’t even trained as infantrymen. They hadn’t trained together for combat, and they were not ready.

I ruminated on that experience of listening to the men of the 7th Cavalry for two years, while I waited for command of an infantry company. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do as a commander, but I knew that I couldn’t let my company end up like 2-7. When I was finally handed the Guidon for Baker Company, 2-12 Infantry Battalion, symbolizing my assumption of command, I was ready.

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Part Two

Soon after I took command of a rifle company, a new Lieutenant Colonel assumed command of the battalion. One of the first things the new battalion commander wanted to do was inspect each company’s motorpool operations. The battalion executive officer (XO) sent an email to all the company commanders and company XOs, outlining the battalion commander’s expectations for the inspection. The new commander wanted to be briefed on all the details about our containers and rolling stock. I made sure that Jake, my brand new company XO, got the email, and asked him if he needed any help because he would be the one briefing the battalion commander. Jake was a little nervous and unsure, but he told me that he thought he had it under control. I had a feeling that we were going to “failceed” during this inspection, and I was excited.

Sure enough, when the battalion commander inspected our part of the motorpool, we didn’t know which containers were ours, or who had the keys, or what was in them. Our vehicles had outdated paperwork and we didn’t know if they were working or broken, or if there were any parts on order. In short, it was a disaster. The battalion commander finally just stopped, turned to me and said sternly, “Captain Caroe, your company failed this week. I am extremely disappointed.” I smiled, looked at my battalion commander and said, “no doubt, sir. We’ll do better next time.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the battalion XO’s mouth fall open in disbelief.

Shortly after the inspection the battalion XO pulled me aside and listed everything we had done wrong. He told me that my company looked terrible and that I should be embarrassed. I simply thanked him for his input and assured him, as I had assured the battalion commander, that we would do better next time. After I went back inside, Jake came into my office with a look of defeat and embarrassment. On the verge of tears, he said, “Sir, I am so sorry I let you down, I don’t know what happened.” 

I asked him to sit down and said, “Jake, we’re both brand new to our jobs. We’re a light infantry unit and our vehicles aren’t pacing items. That doesn’t mean our vehicles and containers aren’t important, it means that today was a ‘failcess.’” Jake looked confused and asked, “What is a failcess?” I smiled and said, “It is a little failure that allows you to achieve a greater amount of success than you would have had without the failure.” Jake still looked confused, so I went on, “Jake, I was pretty sure that you weren’t ready for this inspection. At any point I could have stepped in and walked you through exactly how I wanted our maintenance and container control program to run.” Jake stopped me and said, “Then why didn’t you?” I took a deep breath and said, “because I wanted you to learn that what you do matters to this company. If you do something that you shouldn’t do, or fail to do something you should do, no one is going to pick up the slack. There’s no one that’s going to save you. The company’s success is dependent upon your ability to take initiative and use good judgement. If I had told you exactly what to do, then it is likely that you would have continued to rely on me in the future. You would have been too focused on pleasing me, and not focused enough on doing the right thing for the company. Now you see and you will never forget that if you fail, the entire company fails.” Jake started to understand, but he was clearly still upset.

I walked around my desk, sat next to Jake and said, “You are so important to this company, and what you do matters. Make no mistake about it, today was rough, but I know that you are never going to ever let it happen again. You know what you did wrong, and you know exactly what you must do to fix it. Today was a ‘failcess’ so that tomorrow can be a success.” We talked for a little bit longer, and Jake was still upset when he left my office, but I was certain that he was destined to become one of the top XOs in the battalion.

Over the next few months our battalion was in and out of the field, conducting a no-notice Emergency Deployment Readiness Exercise (EDRE) to Germany, and a JRTC rotation, before deploying to Afghanistan. During that time, Jake had other failures, but they quickly became less frequent and less severe. I watched him grow as a leader, and he often referred back to “the great motorpool fiasco of March 2017,” and how that failure motivated him to succeed in every facet of his job. Jake became one of the best XOs in the battalion. At JRTC the OC/Ts told me that Jake had the greatest company-level logistical systems that they had ever seen during a Decisive Action Training Environment (DATE) rotation. When we deployed to Afghanistan in 2018, I knew that Jake would never, ever sit around and wait to be told what to do, and neither would any of my other leaders who I taught using this technique.

When I was doing my out-counseling with Jake he told me, “Sir, thank you for letting me learn by giving me the freedom to do my job.” It is likely that someone as smart as Jake would have succeeded under most commanders, even ones that don’t believe in failceeding. But the radical trust that I placed in Jake, and my determination to let him succeed or fail on his own allowed him, and the company, to achieve greater success than he likely would have had under a commander who never allowed him to fail. 

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Part Three

Some have suggested to me that I should have alerted my battalion commander that I was purposely allowing my XO to fail in order to teach him - to make my boss an accomplice to my plan. There are two reasons why this suggestion is not in line with “failceeding.” First, I had no idea whether or not we were going to fail our motorpool inspection. Based on Jake’s inexperience I guessed that failure was probable, but I had no idea how the inspection was going to go. Second, even if I was certain we were going to fail, alerting the battalion commander would have prevented actual failure; the failure would have been synthetic, not genuine. On a more practical note, the battalion commander was brand new, and I had no idea how he was going to react if I told him that I planned to let my XO fail the inspection. For all I knew he could have thought my idea was dumb, or cruel, and he could have told me not to do it. He could have told me that it was better to coach my XO to success, rather than let him fail.

 The idea of “failceeding” is far more radical than it appears on the surface. “Failceeding” isn’t something that a commander plans; it isn’t a proactive step. It describes purposeful and mindful inaction. When I heard the battalion commander was going to inspect the motorpool, I had two options: 1) get personally involved in the details to ensure that everything was ready for the inspection, or 2) accept that there was a high probability of failure, and then harness the psychological consequences of failure to drive us to be better than we would have been without failure. I chose the second option because I wanted to teach Jake that his actions matter; success or failure rested on him, and him alone. Throughout our time together I always told him that I was always there to help him prioritize tasks, give him advice or refined guidance, or anything else he needed help with, but he had to ask. He knew I was never going to step in unless he asked me to.

An objection that some have raised is that commanders should drive their organizations to be the best in everything that they do, instead of waiting for failure to come along and teach them. But my argument is that a commander who harnesses “failcess” ultimately gets better results than a commander who is constantly working to prevent failure. If your subordinates know that the organization will never fail because you will not let it fail, they will have no reason to think that their actions matter, because they will never see how devastating their mistakes can be. If a platoon leader does a great job on a task, she might get a pat on the back. If she is about to fail at a task, and then you save the day, she will be less likely to see how important her actions are. In the future, her thought pattern will be, “If I don’t do this, then my boss will have to step in and then will get angry at me.” But what she should think is, “If I don’t work to succeed, then no one is going to bail me out and the organization will suffer.” This produces long-term success because when every person in an organization knows that their actions matter, they will be a lot more careful when they act. Not only does “failcess” get better results in the long run, it makes the organization a better team in the short run; the act of collaborating on courses of action following a failure or setback is itself a useful exercise.

Another objection that some have raised is that “failceeding” sounds a lot like laziness, and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree. A lazy commander who gives broad intent and a basic plan, and then tells his subordinates that success or failure depends on their actions, is much closer to executing Mission Command than an extremely proactive commander who is constantly giving detailed guidance, and then supervising to ensure his orders are followed to the letter. (Failceeding is an applied form of laziness, a topic that we’ll cover in the next essay). The epitome of “failceeding” is assigning responsibilities to subordinate leaders, giving broad intent, and then letting whatever is going to happen, happen, especially failure. In many ways “failcess” is a Mission Command tool. It is a psychological technique that commanders can use on themselves to prevent becoming too involved in the duties of their subordinates. It also makes commanders psychologically inoculated to failures and setbacks, training their brains to look for opportunities in the face of failure.

A third objection is that “failceeding” inculcates a fear of failure, leading subordinates to freeze rather than to act. My counter to this objection is that not all fear of failure is the same and that fear of failure isn’t necessarily a bad thing. When we say “fear of failure” we too often mean “fear of being corrected for failure.” When a subordinate chooses a course of action that ends in failure, overcorrection is usually what instills fear in the future. “Failcess” allows subordinates to experience the negative consequences inherent to the failure, followed by supportive coaching to enable their growth. In the future, subordinates will fear the negative consequences of failure, and will take steps to avoid those consequences, without the fear that they will get hammered by their boss for doing the wrong thing. “Failcess” actually enables subordinates to feel free to act, knowing that if they fail they will learn and grow. Contrary to instilling a fear of failure, subordinates will learn to take steps that avoid known negative consequences, knowing that the steps that they take, even if they lead to a different type of failure, will not bring the wrath of their commander. 

The decision about choosing to do nothing rather than something requires wisdom and discernment. Obviously, there are some failures that are unacceptable, and a commander must know when to take action. If lives are at stake, if something illegal, immoral, or unethical is happening, or if failure will do irreparable harm to someone’s career, then a commander should step in immediately. If you see a weapons squad leader forget to shift his squad’s fire as the maneuver element approaches the objective, please don’t let him “failceed.”

Crucial to knowing when to “failceed” is understanding your commander’s intent. In the motorpool example, the battalion commander never gave me his intent, his XO simply told me that the battalion commander was going to inspect our motorpool. It would have been entirely different if the battalion commander had sat down with the company commanders and said, “readiness is extremely important to me. The world is a chaotic and volatile place, and because of that we need to be ready to deploy on very short notice. My intent is that all the companies have container control and maintenance programs that support my vision of readiness. To ensure my intent is being met, I will be conducting motorpool walkthroughs twice a month.” If that had been the case, I would have gotten all my lieutenants together, explained the commander’s intent, and issued more specific guidance. But that isn’t what happened, so I was completely fine with potentially failing an inspection. Just because something is going to be inspected, does not mean that it should become a commander’s first priority. Allowing your unit to fail an inspection might be the most honest thing you can do as a commander. This is something that most commanders don’t get.

A unit always has dozens of things going on at the same time. If you receive notice that someone is coming down to inspect something, the arms room for example, is it really best for your unit to stop what it’s doing and put a lot of energy into ensuring that you ace the inspection? More likely than not, you should tell the armorer about the inspection, ask how you can help, and not give it a second thought until you see the results (unless, of course, the armorer asks for help). If you fail the inspection, you are giving your boss (or whoever ordered the inspection) the most honest view of what is typical of your arms room.

Sure, if fail you might look like an idiot to your boss because every other unit did backflips and stayed late to get the arms room ready for the inspection, but your unit hasn’t lost any momentum - you are maintaining a surplus of organizational energy that you can use in a true emergency. For those commanders who surge organizational capacity to pass the inspection, not only is their momentum hampered, but their arms room is more likely to fall back into its pre-inspection state. If it was understood that all of the effort being applied to the arms room was for the inspection, once the inspection is complete, why put in the effort to maintain that high state of readiness? On the other hand, if you fail the inspection, you can give the armorer the “failceeding” talk, and then you’ll likely have a better arms room than you would have had if you got personally involved in the inspection. The improvements to the arms room after failing an inspection are more likely to last because the armor is more likely to feel like the owner of the arms room.

The proper execution of “failcess” depends on the commander’s ability to coach her subordinates when they fail and help them grow as individuals and as members of the organization. As important as allowing failure is: 1) taking personal ownership and responsibility for the failure, and 2) not overcorrecting subordinates who fail, but calmly coaching them through the situation and letting them come up with a course of action to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Every officer and leader in my charge gets my “failcess talk” at one point or another. When they botch a brief to the battalion commander, when their tactical plans get them wiped out by the OPFOR during training, when they get their platoon lost because they move along the wrong azimuth, or when their platoon has to stay late because they forgot to accomplish a task during the day, they end up in the same chair Jake sat in. We talk about the importance of their job, and that the unit relies on them and their actions. I use the Socratic Method to go over what happened and help guide them to courses of action that will lead them to success in the future. Without calm, supportive, and constructive coaching, “failceeding” is counterproductive.

Every failure that happens should strengthen your organization. As a commander, it is your duty not to make your organization resistant to failure, but stronger because of failure.¹ By stopping minor failures from happening, you are weakening your unit. If you stop all failure from happening, no learning occurs. Even if you stop a failure from occurring and then say, “we would have failed if I didn’t step in, so next time do X, Y, and Z,” the only thing your subordinates will learn is that you will rescue them before the consequences of their action (or inaction) have any effect. Your subordinates may do X, Y, and Z next time, but only because you told them to, not because they know what will happen if they don’t. Learning from one failure makes it less likely that another type of failure will occur in the future. The success of your unit cannot rely solely on the decisions that you make as the commander. Subordinates have to know that their actions have consequences for the unit, not just for them personally.

The best way to understand the mindset behind “failcess” is to ask yourself this question: when you find out that your boss, or another higher-ranking person, is coming to observe one of your unit’s training events, what do you do? If you start doing a bunch of things that you weren’t going to do already, or stop doing something that you were doing, your head isn’t where it needs to be. When you hear that your boss is coming, you should be comfortable giving her an accurate look at your organization. As I said before, “failcess” isn’t something you plan, but it is something that you should be prepared for. 

Allowing your unit to “failceed” is one of the most important things you can do as a commander. It takes judgment and discernment to know when you should let the failure happen, and when you should step in. When you feel the urge to step-in and rescue your unit from a minor failure, remember that you may be preventing your organization from achieving the level of success that it could achieve if you choose to do nothing. In the military, a culture based on perfectionism and an obsession with “first-time-GOs,” this is wildly counter-intuitive. No one wants to look bad in front of “the boss.” But commanders aren’t paid to look good for their bosses, they are paid to lead America’s men and women in combat. If you want to make your unit the best that it can be, you have to encourage it to “failceed.”

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Closing

Coming back to where we started this essay, I was determined to never let an officer under my command have the thought “there must be someone who’s going to come and give me orders.” Failceeding is just a little technique that you can use in a garrison or training environment to help subordinate leaders develop a sense of empowerment, initiative, and ownership, it’s not a panacea. You can’t run a unit based on failceeding alone. And obviously, the whole point is to decrease the number of failures over time by learning and growing.

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Coming Up

As I mentioned in this essay, failceeding is an applied form of laziness. In the next essay, I am going to greatly expand on this topic and talk about why laziness is wildly underrated.

1. Check out the book Antifragile by Nassim Taleb. It’s one of my favorites.